Where can Biochemistry proceed differently? (I do not imply that “pathology” occurs anywhere during this discourse)

Sometimes, there is a transfer of the SRY gene to the X chromosome from the Y – where XX karyotypes are now expressing male determining factor

There can also be a downturn in testosterone response in two crucial stages of embryonic development:

1 – The stage where cerebral hardwiring for sexual identity changes from the female default setting to male
2 – The different stage of embryonic development where cerebral hardwiring for sexual orientation changes from the default setting of attraction to males to attraction to females.

Of course, Hormone/Hormone Receptor status & SRY expression do not operate independently of each other. So, what about non-binary situations?

At birth, the genitalia can be ambiguous. Very rarely is the newborn a true hermaphrodite, but rather the genitals may not be well-formed or the baby may have characteristics of both sexes. The external sex organs may not match the internal sex organs or genetic sex.

Often (but not always) genital ambiguity corresponds with ambiguity in sexual identity and/or sexual orientation (resulting from hormone/hormone receptor status in utero). Nature is not binary under these circumstances: there can exist ambiguities in gender/sex status, in other words a continuum.

In other words: it is indeed possible to be a lesbian trapped in a man’s body: that is no joke! Meanwhile, some of the most feminine women on our planet are (Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome) AIS individuals with XY karyotypes, who do not respond to Testosterone. That said, hormone/receptor status is not always, all or nothing; some AIS individuals are “intermediate” in both Gender/Sex. Ben Barres (a famous transgender scientist who just recently succumbed to pancreatic cancer) is both a heroine and a role-model worthy of public adulation; another exception to the Biological rules cited above. She was cerebrally hard-wired to be male and not female despite her XY status.

The Biology cited above is not exhaustive but sufficient for our purposes.

OK OK, where does that leave us so far?

Everything described so far is decidedly binary and the gender-fluid exceptions to the rule are indeed real, but VERY RARE, far less than one percent of the population.

So, why are we currently witnessing a bumper-crop in gender-dysphoria in schools and campuses requiring a rethink in administration and teacher practice (not to mention a different set of washrooms in public buildings)?

I suggest, in politest terms possible, we are witnessing some public mass hysteria which is resulting in the horrible enabling of teenage angst and attention seeking, all with tragic results. I humbly admit I could be wrong on this, but I feel morally obliged to ask the question.

Many teens resort to self-injury/cutting, a sad condition (a result of teen angst) requiring intervention. Today, we now witness what I deem a similar phenomenon; i.e. pseudo-Gender Dysphoria (again, a result of teen angst). However, instead of intervention, conventional wisdom would male us codependents and enable teenage angst even to self-mutilation at an early age; all before frontal lobes are fully developed and hormones settle down. I am not saying gender-dysphoria is always unreal: I am suggesting there may be many false positives when diagnosing gender-dysphoria today.

Here in Canada, Kenneth Zucker, a renowned psychologist specializing in Sexology has taken a more conservative (and common sense) approach.

He counsels confused teens while encouraging them to wait. As a result, over 80% of these confused teens (after they calm down) discover they really were confused and 88% eventually reconcile with their birth gender. Meanwhile, a new BBC documentary, (Transgender Kids: Who Knows Best?) has highlighted Doctor Zucker’s success. Of course, Canada’s moral and intellectual superiors responded by shutting down the BBC documentary on Canadian Television, not to mention shutting down Dr. Zucker’s clinic. Political Correctness will brook no compromise!

OK, let’s bring this home:

Can Sex and/or Gender be nonbinary from a scientific point of view? Yes, continua exist, but only in very rare cases: we are probably talking far less than one percent of the population. Is Gender a “Social Construct” and can it be “fluid”? The jury seems still to be out on either question, but all indications so far are: “No” on both counts?

Do these answers really change anything at a fundamental level. Decidedly no! Everyone still MUST treat each other with respect, not to mention love and compassion (that includes you too SJWs)

That all said – Primum non nocere! “first, do no harm!” Perhaps we should revisit our mad rush to mutilate youngsters, and pay heed to Doctor Zucker. Current evidence indicates the subsequent depression of Transgenders results in a 40%+ suicide rate – an instance where the cure indeed is far worse than the “ailment”. Well maybe not. At the very least, we should pause to ask the question and proceed cautiously.

185 Replies to “Are Social Justice Warriors denying science? Is either Sex or Gender fluid?”

Alan Fox: I’m not sure whether those of us who are spectators have any right to judge. My only caveat is surgeons too ready to wield the knife for profit.

Well, I have two friends who are post-op transgender women, and both are much happier and better adjusted having made the transition. Is “surgeons too ready to wield the knife for profit” a well-documented problem?

Current evidence indicates the subsequent depression of Transgenders results in a 40%+ suicide rate – an instance where the cure indeed is far worse than the “ailment”. Well maybe not. At the very least, we should pause to ask the question and proceed cautiously.

Is the suggestion here that being transgendered causes depression and suicide? Indeed, let us proceed cautiously.

After all, one might think that what causes depression and suicide amongst transgendered teenagers is not actually being transgendered, but being ostracized, bullied, mocked, and denied love and support from family and friends.

To determine this, one would need to have the depression and suicide rates from the following four groups:

1. Cisgendered teenagers who receive affirmation, love, and support from family and friends.

2. Transgendered teenagers who receive affirmation, love, and support from family and friends.

3. Cisgendered teenagers who are denied affirmation, love, and support from family and friends (perhaps due to some other kind of deviance from social norms, such as being bad at sports, socially awkward, enjoy reading too much, or prefer D&D to human interactions, etc.).

4. Transgendered teenagers who are denied affirmation, love, and support from family and friends.

If simply being transgendered or undoing gender dysphoria were sufficient to be causing depression or suicide, one would expect that the depression and suicide in Group 2 would be comparable to that of Group 4.

But if what’s driving depression and suicide in transgendered teenagers is the pain of social ostracism, then one would expect the depression and suicide in Group 2 to be comparable to that of Group 1.

stcordova: I think it is perfectly ethical to say to a trans leaning boy, “you have really intense feelings you are a girl trapped in a man’s body, you have an 80-95% chance of growing out of it one day as the body self heals your mind. You might one day appreciate you are a man and be glad you didn’t irreversibly mutilate you body parts like Jazz Jennings. If you don’t grow out of it, it’s your choice what to do then. Have you ever changed your mind about something? What if you chop off your parts, and then change your mind, are you willing to take that risk?”

Unless you are a professional you have no business talking to a boy about sex unless he is your child. Second, in what world do you think a boy is going to be anything but creeped out by your obsession with Jazz Jennings and chopping off parts. Your intentions might be good but you are solving a non problem. Operations cost lots of money and likely require parental consent.

Second, in what world do you think a boy is going to be anything but creeped out by your obsession with Jazz Jennings and chopping off parts.

I hoped these boys are told the truth and I hope they are frigging creeped out by the risks they are taking. There are other routes to treatment than encouraging boys to friggin self-castrating themselves!

Ok so a boy decides to “transition”. His body parts will become slowly mutilated as he grows to adult hood. He then counts on gender reassignment. But that ain’t the end of it.

Milo Yianopolous mentioned something about the content which I found by googling to the following link which I couldn’t read in depth because it was way too disturbing. There are maintenance issues and pain issues with the neo-vagina that the guy might have to suffer through after having his body parts lobbed off.

Any technique of vaginoplasty performed will require vaginal dilation of the patient for the rest of her life with a set of vaginal stents. This is due to the surrounding tissues, including the PC muscle, trying to move back to their original positions, forcing the neovagina closed.

Scar tissue will form at any place that two pieces of tissue (in the form of grafts) are joined together in this manner. Scar tissue has very different properties than the rest of the skin. The two most important differences are that as it heals it becomes much less elastic and it contracts as it heals.

Ok, if one is a transgendered “woman”, will having to do this the rest of his life make him feel like a female, or remind you of the surgery you subjected yourself to. There could be scar tissue down there.

If a guy wants to do this to himself after he has all the facts, that’s up to him. I think kids are being less than informed about the risks they are taking by starting to take chemical therapies with the idea that one day they’ll be reassigned.

If public schools like in my county are going to make transgendered bathrooms etc., what will the biology and health high school classes teach about this. Shouldn’t we level with them and tell them all the possible medical complications? Don’t they have the right to know their options? Don’t they have the right to know they may have special challenges given their psychological makeup? Maybe there won’t be any perfect solutions, but maybe some are less radical options than chemically and surgically mutilating oneself.

If someone just enjoys just dressing up, that’s not quite so bad for their own physical welfare I suppose. Changing clothes is at least reversible. Here is a case of a woman who did just that so she could learn what it’s like to be a man. That didn’t bother me so much, and she learned a lot about men in the process:

OMagain: Then the question becomes why does your god create people who feel their biological gender is incorrect?

I told you Sal it was coming…

God created people with gender dysphoria and now doesn’t allow them to live according to his design… It’s a bad design, so the designer, even the bad one, must not exist….
Same principles must apply to alcoholics, drug addicts, thieves, murderers, and any other disorders inflicting mankind, including death…

It’s a good question though… Not many scholars are able to explain it well other than Adam sinned, lost perfection, reproduced in sin (with the effects sin) which caused his offspring to be sinful and more in perfect in next generations due to mutations etc…
To explain it in scientific terms is even harder… I explain it to my kids in terms of quantum coherence/decoherence, quantum arrangement/quantum disarrangement…

newton: You asked why natural selection had not done its job, I am telling you it has. If kids with gender issues don’t grow up and make babies it will do its job there…
You going to crawfish now?

Since this is not a new issue, natural selection has been letting the “unfit” to sneak through. More and more seem to be omitted by natural selection as the statistics show 27% youths are, or can be “unfit” … from the prospective of population genetics, that is…
Your optimism about the efficiency of natural selection is unfounded… Even worst. It looks the impotence of natural selection is going to lead to the extinction of mankind…. Joe?

I really miss physics. This year I’m going to try to get back into it. It’s been already 5 years since I got my MS degree in applied physics, and I’m getting a bit rusty.

I think I may be putting together a video series on Quantum Mechanics to start helping me re-learn it and to teach quantum mechanics to other people — although it would probably be the more mundane stuff like what one will find in this book which was the textbook I studied from:

stcordova,
Physics, but especially quantum mechanics, is really cool… I got my kids and some friends hooked on it… My wife has a different taste… lets put it this way… lol
I’ve heard that the best way to figure something out is to write a book… You do the research and put it in the book… you get someone with brains read it and criticise it… Then you do some more research and so on… Penrose has done it…I’ve done it…more than once…
Remember? “After you learn quantum mechanics you are never really the same again…”

Corneel: And God said, “Let there be photons,” and there were photons. God observed the photons, which collapsed the wave function giving a nice diffraction pattern, and he saw it was good.

…And dumb luck “created ” the laws of physics… so that dumb products of those laws, the self’-proclaimed “intelligencia”, would later acknowledge the obvious facts that dumbness can only come from dumbness…
For these and other accomplishments the self proclaimed “intelligencia” products of dumb luck would give each other Nobel Prizes and say: Look! We the intelligence have figured out what dumb luck did. Hurray!

Sorry to have contributed to derailing your thread. I’m not going to have time to follow through with this, but I will mention that children are ordinarily reaching puberty years earlier than they did in, say, the Nineteenth Century. I don’t recall seeing the hard evidence for this, nor for the claim that it is due to improved nutrition. However, I think the evidence is good that brain development is not proceeding faster. It seems that children are going through puberty when they’re not nearly as well prepared to cope with it as they were not so very long ago.

There is also now a fairly high incidence of early puberty. See “Early Puberty: Causes and Effects” in Scientific American. Something very, very strange is going on with our children, hormonally, and I have to doubt that gender confusion is purely cultural. But I’m not well informed on the matter, and will not be working to make myself well-informed. So do with the prompt what you will.

Thank you!

This a very interesting insight! POPs (persistent organic pollutants) are wrecking havoc in our ecosystem and food supply

J-Mac: Since this is not a new issue, natural selection has been letting the “unfit” to sneak through. More and more seem to be omitted by natural selection as the statistics show 27% youths are, or can be “unfit” … from the prospective of population genetics, that is…

The request is for the design explanation for the increase of or for gender dystopia itself. If such behaviors are unfit for survival are they flaws or the intent of the design. Be glad to discuss natural selection more after you supply the how design explains the observation.

stcordova: I hoped these boys are told the truth and I hope they are frigging creeped out by the risks they are taking.There are other routes to treatment than encouraging boys to friggin self-castrating themselves!

No they would be creeped out by your concerns about their genitalia. Strange you have no concern about girls.

Ok so a boy decides to “transition”.His body parts will become slowly mutilated as he grows to adult hood.

Actually that is incorrect, the first drugs used block puberty. From your link:

“Doctors, including Rosenthal, recommend kids get off the puberty blocker by the time they turn 14 for fear of potential side-effects, including the weakening of bones. Once children reach the allowable amount of time on the puberty blockers, they must decide whether to continue the transition process by taking hormones for the rest of their life or stop taking drugs completely to restart their natural puberty process.”

Nothing is mutilated except accuracy by your misconceptions.

He then counts on gender reassignment.But that ain’t the end of it.

There were 1,700 male gender reassignment surgeries in the US in 2016, not all involved castration.

Milo Yianopolous mentioned something about the content…

Sorry, why should I consider anything he says as trustworthy?

Ok, if one is a transgendered “woman”, will having to do this the rest of his life make him feel like a female, or remind you of the surgery you subjected yourself to.There could be scar tissue down there.

Transsexual woman, we are through talking about kids? Any feeling about other side effects of other elective surgeries?

If a guy wants to do this to himself after he has all the facts, that’s up to him.I think kids are being less than informed about the risks they are taking by starting to take chemical therapies with the idea that one day they’ll be reassigned.

The chemical therapies allow a easier transition if at some time when they are informed adults they make an informed decision usually after living some time as ltheir desired sex and after undergoing screening. It does sound like you do have a problem with even adults making the choice

If public schools like in my county are going to make transgendered bathrooms etc., what will the biology and health high school classes teach about this.Shouldn’t we level with them and tell them all the possible medical complications?

Who says biology classes teach anything about even normal sex much less transgender issues? Not in Texas. Problem solved, ignore the fact sex occurs beyond saying do not have sex.

Don’t they have the right to know their options?Don’t they have the right to know they may have special challenges given their psychological makeup?Maybe there won’t be any perfect solutions, but maybe some are less radical options than chemically and surgically mutilating oneself.

You are such a knee jerk right winger, read up on the procedures used in dealing with the issue by professionals.

If someone just enjoys just dressing up, that’s not quite so bad for their own physical welfare I suppose.Changing clothes is at least reversible.Here is a case of a woman who did just that so she could learn what it’s like to be a man.That didn’t bother me so much,

Isn’t that what they call a “tell”. The problem is it bothers you, everything else is trying to justify icky feelings by erecting arguments. That is ok, you have a right to feel the way you do , just don’t expect everyone should feel the same way.

How ican virtue-signalling social justice warriors pretend to embrace a scientific justification for their platitudes while simultaneously embracing the most ridiculous incarnations of pseudo-science!?

to push this line of illogical non-squitors to maximum ignoratio Elenchi, I wonder out loud; could it be possible that guilt ridden progressives are suffering under the burden of being privileged whites !?

Also, out of interest, at what age did you decide you liked girls Sal?

Gentlemen

I refer you to the original OP citing the travails of Kenneth Zucker whose practice counseled Gender Dysmorphic teens not to submit to puberty blocking medication together with hormone injections and genital mutilayiom until … they thought it over for a while and were mature enough to make a considered and confident decision

88 % of his patients ended up NOT transitioning

More importantly, they experienced a suicide very close to the general population 4% as opposed to 40% for transgenders

When I mentioned this on the AP teachers’ forum, I was declared a “Homophobe”

Hmmmm I say!

I wonder if Inwould have been declared a Lobotophobe for suggesting during the 1960s that the 1949 Nobel Prize for lobotomies was an undeserved honour

OMagain: The article also notes that 5 percent to 20 percent will persist in their GD as young adults. As they have not “grown out of it” do you admit that to those 5 to 20 percent it’s real and worth treating?

Read the original OP

Of course Gender Dysphoria is real and such individuals should transition

Of course pseudo Gender Dysphoria is also real and these individuals should not transition

How ican virtue-signalling social justice warriors pretend to embrace a scientific justification for their platitudes while simultaneously embracing the most ridiculous incarnations of pseudo-science!?

to push this line of illogical non-squitors to maximum ignoratio Elenchi, I wonder out loud; could it be possible that guilt ridden progressives are suffering under the burden of being privileged whites !?

Is the suggestion here that being transgendered causes depression and suicide? Indeed, let us proceed cautiously.

After all, one might think that what causes depression and suicide amongst transgendered teenagers is not actually being transgendered, but being ostracized, bullied, mocked, and denied love and support from family and friends.

To determine this, one would need to have the depression and suicide rates from the following four groups:

1. Cisgendered teenagers who receive affirmation, love, and support from family and friends.

2. Transgendered teenagers who receive affirmation, love, and support from family and friends.

3. Cisgendered teenagers who are denied affirmation, love, and support from family and friends (perhaps due to some other kind of deviance from social norms, such as being bad at sports, socially awkward, enjoy reading too much, or prefer D&D to human interactions, etc.).

4. Transgendered teenagers who are denied affirmation, love, and support from family and friends.

If simply being transgendered or undoing gender dysphoria were sufficient to be causing depression or suicide, one would expect that the depression and suicide in Group 2 would be comparable to that of Group 4.

But if what’s driving depression and suicide in transgendered teenagers is the pain of social ostracism, then one would expect the depression and suicide in Group 2 to be comparable to that of Group 1.

I appreciate your identification of confounding variables

However

May I suggest you are perhaps asking the wrong question?

If one course, of shall we say more conservative intervention results in fewer transitions ( presumably because a better job was done at discriminating real GD from pseudo-GD) …

… then should we not pause to evaluate the success of the more conservative approach?

This is not a binary scenario: transitions will still occur under a conservative approach: just fewer transitions due to fewer false positives

Why pseudo? This is like saying a broken leg isn’t really broken because it eventually healed. A pseudo-broken leg? It’s entirely possible the GD was real, and it reversed itself, and was never pseudo.

The fact that some grow out of GD suggest to me GD itself is fluid.

The question then, like many treatments, is weighing benefits and risks. Since it is possible ALL GD is real, but GD is also fluid, it would seem a good route to treating GD is to treat steps to remove the GD from someone’s life. In the case of teens, a simple treatment with a high success rate is to let them self-heal by growing out of it. Whatever the biological mechanism that induced it (it could be environmental, not hereditary), there is evidence the body has a good probability of correcting it in growing children. This is a more conservative approach than trying to nurture the GD, imho. Try to get rid of it than try to coddle it.

There are cosmetic things we do to kids that help them function like giving them dental braces. I have no problem with that. Lot’s of kids have dental surgeries. I have not problem with that.

If the guy has gender dysphoria into adult hood, it’s his choice how to deal with it. However, there are ethical issues there if the guy has children he has to care for and he puts his need to be a woman ahead of taking care of the children he should be providing for. In that case, I think the guy should bear up with the pain of GD, and not give in when his own kids are on the line. It’s his choice what to do with his life, but it’s not just his life that is being affected by him coddling his GD.

stcordova: The question then, like many treatments, is weighing benefits and risks. Since it is possible ALL GD is real, but GD is also fluid, it would seem a good route to treating GD is to treat steps to remove the GD from someone’s life. In the case of teens, a simple treatment with a high success rate is to let them self-heal by growing out of it. Whatever the biological mechanism that induced it (it could be environmental, not hereditary), there is evidence the body has a good probability of correcting it in growing children.

But what that paper is, is a summary of the experience from a Dutch clinic doing pretty much what you’re afraid of — chemically suppressing puberty, followed by sex reassignment surgery. The results are nothing like the disaster you predict; in fact, at least from the summary, they’re completely successful.

Firstly, they’re not just spamming this treatment at every child with some sort of GD; they’re doing careful pre-treatment screening:

First, there is a diagnostic phase in which the actual diagnosis of GID is made, and an estimation is made of potential risk factors for posttreatment regret. Then, during a phase called the “real life test” or “real life experience,” both clinician and patient check whether the applicant is able to live satisfactorily in the desired gender role. Only if the real life experience had been successful, the applicant will be eligible for sex reassignment surgery (SRS).

The results:

In several studies this protocol has been evaluated [16–18]. From these studies it appeared that the youth who were selected for early hormone treatment (starting between 16 and 18 years) no longer suffered from gender dysphoria, and that 1–5 years after surgery, they were socially and psychologically functioning not very different from their peers. Their scores on various psychological instruments, such as a shortened Dutch form of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory and the Symptom Check List-90 [19], were considerably more favorable than scores of a group of subjects who had been treated in adulthood in the Amsterdam clinic, and scores were in the normal range as compared to normative samples. By contrast, there was also a cohort of adolescents presenting with gender dysphoria, who after long-term assessment (which, depending on the degree of gender dysphoria and nonrelated pathology, could take a year or even longer) were not deemed eligible for early treatment, and they did not pursue SR at later ages. So, the burden of the GID, the unabating pursuit of SR, and clinical assessment provided by our clinic appeared to provide acceptable selection criteria for good candidates for SR before adulthood.

RESULTS: After gender reassignment, in young adulthood, the GD was alleviated and psychological functioning had steadily improved. Well- being was similar to or better than same-age young adults from the general population. Improvements in psychological functioning were positively correlated with postsurgical subjective well-being.

So: their protocol works, and makes people’s lives better. Still afraid of it? If so, why?

The 41% suicide rate we hear bandied about is likely inflated due to conflation and combining numbers with incidents of self-harm

Even so, those numbers are STILL alarming!

That said: there is NO conclusive evidence that transitioning indeed lowers the suicide rate and there is suggestion ( again not proof positive ) that a more conservative approach indeed lowers the suicide rate when treating GD even in Europe, including Sweden and the Netherlands

So… should we not take pause to ponder before rising in where angels fear to tread?

So: their protocol works, and makes people’s lives better. Still afraid of it? If so, why?

Hey! Nice to hear from you! Even though just about disagree on everything.

Thanks for the data points.

I think their is a chance someone in this life will feel happier about themselves with a gender reassignment, even though I think it’s a sin in God’s eyes and one day they’ll have to account to Him. But that’s their life to live, I won’t live it for them. I won’t infringe on their freedoms as I wouldn’t want them to infringe on mine.

In any case, I will very much agree screening for post-operative regret is very important, and to the extent it prevents people from doing something they will regret, that is a good thing.

But what bothers me (beyond theological issues) regarding the studies you provided? The time frame involved.

David Peter Reimer (August 22, 1965 – May 4, 2004) was a Canadian man born physically male but reassigned as a girl and raised female following medical advice and intervention after his penis was accidentally destroyed during a botched circumcision in infancy.[1][better source needed]

Psychologist John Money oversaw the case and reported the reassignment as successful and as evidence that gender identity is primarily learned. Academic sexologist Milton Diamond later reported that Reimer’s realization he was not a girl crystallized between the ages of 9 and 11,[2] and he transitioned to living as a male at age 15. Well known in medical circles for years anonymously as the “John/Joan” case, Reimer later went public with his story to help discourage similar medical practices. He later committed suicide after suffering years of severe depression, financial instability, and a troubled marriage.[3]

Ok, so the timeline was almost 40 years. Granted he was essentially forced to be in a woman’s body by a series of unfortunate events, but he was mentally a male. The moral of the story however is that around the time of the surgery, this was advertised this as a Happily Ever After story resulting from the surgeons knife. I had an old sociology book that advertised it as such. But that was early in the patient’s life. We know it was perhaps a tragic decision 40 years after the fact.

How this relates to your question is that it’s a little premature of a sample size to take a few years of Post Op results and not assess the consequences 20 years down the line. It’s fair to say we know less about biology and our medical practice than maybe we think we know.

stcordova: Ok, so the timeline was almost 40 years. Granted he was essentially forced to be in a woman’s body by a series of unfortunate events, but he was mentally a male. The moral of the story however is that around the time of the surgery, this was advertised this as a Happily Ever After story resulting from the surgeons knife

I used to have a friend who would look for the worse, stupid beyond belief unfunny “ jokes “ in order to torture his audience. .Your stories remind me of him.

Strangely the way he judged the success of the joke was the amount of abuse he took from the tortured . We happily obliged.

SJWs are confused and cannot sort out conflated concepts: Gender Identity is NOT learned, Gender Expression IS learned

The other point where I am unclear and still have not wrapped my head around:

Exactly how binary (or not) are we regarding sexual orientation? (Which is a completely different notion than gender identity or gender expression) Is the natural default setting of humans in fact little different than Bonobos?

Any monastery abbot or prison warden will inform you that more homo/bisexuals exit an institution than entered it.

Is that a result of natural inate “fluidity” or rather an unnatural setting resulting in psychological damage; the result of forcing a square peg into a round hole, for lack of a better metaphor… nyuck nyuck nyuck